Entertainment

How Twitter Conquered the World in 2009

It's hard to argue that 2009 wasn't the year of Twitter. Yes, the questions about monetization loomed over the young web company as soon as it started gaining popularity, and they're still largely unanswered. But people loved this new way of communicating via 140 character messages that go out to everyone who wants to hear them. So much so, that everything else (even money) wasn't very important.

It was a bumpy ride, though. Remember when Twitter was a joke? A perpetualjoke about serverinstability? The amount of downtime Twitter had back in 2008, continuing into the first half of 2009, would have killed many web startups. No matter how good your service is, if people can't use it, they'll go elsewhere.

Surprisingly though, Twitter has proven to be resilient enough to withstand all that. When it went down, people would joke about it with nervous Fail Whale cracks on FriendFeed. When it came back up, everyone would start tweeting like nothing ever happened. And although these frequent downtimes continued for over a year, somewhere in the middle of 2009, Twitter finally found its balance. The users? Well, they're still tweeting like nothing ever happened.

But there are two things about Twitter users that largely contributed to its stellar rise in popularity. First, it's used by regular folks, not just tech-savvy geeks. And second, it's become the favorite service of TV, movie and music personalities. The most popular guy on Twitter is not Twitter's founder — it's Ashton Kutcher. After him comes Britney Spears, Ellen DeGeneres, Barack Obama, and Oprah Winfrey. When all these people are into something, you can bet that thousands will follow.

It's Everywhere!

Furthermore, Twitter became a great way to run charity events, break news, promote your work and connect with your fans. Events like Michael Jackson's death were followed on Twitter first, and major media outlets second, simply because Twitter's tiny chunks of information travel faster than professionally written news stories. And when the Iran election results started a wave of riots across the country and protests worldwide, Twitter was the glue that held bits and pieces of the story together.

The result? You couldn't watch TV for one day without Twitter being mentioned somewhere. Dana White, UFC's head honcho, Tweets like crazy during every UFC event. CNN's Don Lemon is also a very active user. Twitter hasn't paid these folks to promote their service. They're just using it because it's valuable to them, because it's simple, and because they like it. You can't get better promotion than that. For a while, Twitter was on top of the world, and the founders could afford to shrug off monetization questions as if money was of no importance to them.

New Features

On the development side of things, 2009 was an immensely important year for Twitter. The notoriously feature-shy service was largely turned into what it is today by its users. Originally, features such as retweets and hashtags were forged by the user base, not the developers. Furthermore, third-party clients such as TweetDeck and Seesmic raced to add the features that Twitter itself was lacking.

In late 2009, the folks behind Twitter decided to take a more active role in the shaping of the service by adding several important features, most notably Lists and built-in Retweets.

Adding Lists was a no-brainer. Twitter users pined for a tool to organize their friends into groups since Twitter's beginnings. Retweets, however, were a slightly different take on the feature first invented by the community. Making such a change - even if it's a subtle one - took some guts, as the community often greets such interventions with hostility. Luckily for Twitter, there were no mass riots over matters of retweeting.

The Growth Suddenly Stops

During the summer of 2009, problems began to pile up again. Twitter (along with several other services) were more or less permanently blocked in China. More importantly, they stopped growing in the US. After their amazingly fast growth during 2008 and the first half of 2009, we assumed it was an anomaly. But it wasn't. According to Compete, Twitter's traffic has flatlined, and co-founder Evan Williams eventually admitted that their US traffic had stalled. And in the world of web startups, once you stop growing, the cheers and confetti soon get replaced by mockery and, ultimately, oblivion.

The Importance of Real-Time

The momentum, however, was too strong. Real-time search — and Google's inability to best Twitter at it — became a huge trend in 2009. Everyone wanted a piece of it, and Twitter had the goods. When you want to find out what's happening right now, this very minute, Twitter's search trumped Google, and Google had no choice but to react. Luckily for Twitter, the reaction came right on time. Both Bing and Google signed a deal with Twitter to incorporate real-time results from Twitter into web searches, just as Twitter's flat traffic figures became impossible to hide. The effect of this deal is still unknown, but when Google sends you traffic, you can bet it's going to be noticeable.

Twitter's future is still uncertain. We still don’t know the overall business plan beyond a few hints at at least some current revenue, and we still don't know if the service's huge popularity boom in 2009 was just a passing fad. One thing is certain, though: The Google deal was the adrenaline injection Twitter needed. If Twitter is really destined to become the world's new SMS, 2010 is the time to do it, and we're happy to be along for the ride.

Mashable
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